


Trouble over Papadum

by briony8969



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Awkward Dates, Canon-Typical Violence, First Kiss, M/M, Restaurants, set after the book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 21:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18677392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briony8969/pseuds/briony8969
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley meet up for dinner after quite a long time not seeing one another. Each of them has their own agenda for the evening, but things do not go according to plan.





	Trouble over Papadum

Aziraphale sat alone at a table for two in a small family owned Bangladeshi restaurant in central London. A keen-eyed observer might have noticed that he kept arranging and rearranging the cutlery like a newlywed hosting her in-laws for Christmas dinner for the first time, or, more accurately, an angel waiting to meet with an old friend who happened to be a demon. No keen-eyed observer made any such observation, however, because Aziraphale had made his presence at this particular restaurant as difficult to percieve as it was in his power to make it. He’d become so unnoticeable, in fact, that he rather worried about eventually having to flag down the waitress’s attention. He hated to be rude. Everyone was working so hard. 

“Hello Angel.” A familiar voice hissed, and Aziraphale, much to his dismay, blushed. 

“Crowley.” He said to the tall slim gentleman now standing by his table. He wanted to say, “Hello dear,” which was how he addressed most people, even the uber driver who had dropped him off at the restaurant, but he restrained himself. 

Crowley slid into his seat across from the pinkish angel and ran his fingers across the sensible paper cover which the restaurant owners had chosen to place over top of their actual, really quite nice, tablecloths. 

“Not one of your usual restaurant choices, I noticed.” Crowley said. “More reasonably priced for one thing. Having some trouble at the Bookshop?” 

In fact, the rare book market was thriving in the year of our Lord 2019. Aziraphale had actually worked up the nerve to sell one of his prizes (an original and Important copy of Barclay’s Apology for Quakers or, AN APOLOGY FOR THE TRUE CHRISTIAN DIVINITY AS THE SAME IS HELD FORTH AND PREACHED BY THE PEOPLE, CALLED, IN SCORN, QUAKERS, BEING A FULL EXPLANATION AND VINDICATION OF THEIR Principles and Doctrines BY MANY ARGUMENTS DEDUCED FROM SCRIPTURE AND RIGHT REASON AND THE TESTIMONIES OF FAMOUS AUTHORS BOTH ANCIENT AND MODERN WITH A FULL ANSWER TO THE STRONGEST OBJECTIONS USUALLY MADE AGAINST THEM PRESENTED TO THE KING Written and published in Latin, for the information of strangers, by Robert Barclay). 

Titling really was an art form back in the good old days.

The proceeds from this particular sale of Barclay’s Apology were enough to support an angel living alone on a modest budget for, oh, a good 10 years. 

“Not at all.” Aziraphale explained. He took a deep breath and sat back, taking in the ambience. “You’ll understand when we order. Or are you more in the mood for spending a month’s rent on one glass of wine?” 

“No! No of course not. This is… perfectly all right.”

The two supernatural beings stared at one another with more awkardness than really seemed necessary, considering that they had known one another for literally millennia. 

~*~

It had all gone wrong very shortly after the failed Apocalypse. In the heady days immediately following the “end of the world” when neither Crowley nor Aziraphale could believe that they had gotten away with it, the two of them had rather reveled in their continued physical existence. They’d met up on a weekly, no, closer to daily basis. They ate gelato for every meal. Crowley finally convinced Aziraphale to go on a roller coaster (Aziraphale was not sure he saw the appeal in traveling at a great speed to trick your body into thinking it is in imminent peril, but he’d enjoyed the way Crowley had taken his hand to help him wobble out of the ride). They stayed up all night talking and drinking and laughing.

And it all would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for that damned, er, blessed, Time That They Had Held Hands. 

Aziraphale desperately wanted it to happen again. For a few thrilling moments, with the earth shuddering beneath their feet, seconds away from facing the King of Hell himself, Crowley and Aziraphale had moved just a hint closer to a level of physical intimacy that had eluded them for centuries. And then afterwards, Crowley had taken him by the hand at least three times. But, for some reason, the physical interactions had stopped, and Aziraphale found that whenever he tried to bring it up he was struck by a level of anxiety more appropriate for a 13 year old girl facing down her first choir solo.

Aziraphale began to imagine all sorts of things. That Crowley had never intended for the hand holding to be anything but strictly platonic. Perhaps he’d done it as a symbol of their heavenly and fraternal bond. Which would be just like that demonic bastard, Aziraphale considered. Crowley had an irritating way of being at his most ethical at precisely the moment Aziraphale was about to be, just ever so slightly, devilish. 

Filled with doubts, and stricken with a complete incapacity to address them, Aziraphale had made things weird. Where their conversations had always been fun, fast moving, pleasant, they became belabored and short, leaving both parties exhausted and covered in an inexplicable cold sweat. They met up less and less, following the natural entropy of interpersonal relationships when not duly tended to, and this meeting at the restaurant was their first in a decade. Not too long in Angel and Demon years, but just perhaps long enough to warrant an explanation. 

~*~

Their waitress, a 22 year old woman named Priyani whose parents owned the restaurant, realized with shock that she’d had customers for gosh knows how long and hadn’t even filled their water glasses. Aziraphale gave her a slightly apologetic look as she hurried up to their table, interrupting what appeared to have been an unhealthily long pause in the conversation. 

“Good afternoon gentlemen! I am so sorry for the wait. I’ll have some Papadum brought over for you as soon as possible.”

“Don’t trouble yourself!” Aziraphale said with a warm, encouraging smile which lit up his whole face. “You’re doing splendidly!”

Priyani, to whom it was second nature to fend off compliments from customers, felt unreasonably pleased at the shabbily dressed man’s words. She glowed a bit. 

“Do trouble yourself over the papadum, though.” Crowley mentioned, trying not to sound mean. “I love a good papadum. And sauces.” 

“Of course!” Priyani had walked over the table feeling tired, slightly hung over, and with blisters on her heels. She stepped away feeling like she could run a marathon and then immediately afterwards win a beauty pageant. And THEN successfully argue that beauty pageants were sexist trash, bring an end to the whole thing and put women’s rights forward by a decade. 

“What a lovely girl.” Aziraphale said, turning back to Crowley. 

“You’re ridiculous.” Crowley said. ”I thought we were supposed to… what was it Adam said? ‘Stop messin’ about with people?’” 

“Oh that was nothing.” Aziraphale gave a dismissive wave. “Just a little free dopamine. And anyway he was more speaking to you than me.” 

Crowley squinted dubiously, “I’m not sure I agree…” 

“it is very good to see you.” Aziraphale interrupted, making an effort to have his expression match the earnestness with which he spoke the words. The end effect was that he looked like perhaps the most earnest being to ever walk the planet. Crowley felt pummeled by all the earnestness. 

“I, uh, yeah good to see you too, mate.” Crowley managed to reply.

“It has been a decade, I think.” 

“Yeah. I’ve been uh, meaning to ask you about that, actually.” 

“About what? The decade?”

“Well, not exactly…”

“Because it has been, if you don’t mind me saying, one” Aziraphale leaned in and whispered “hell” and then sat back up. “Of a decade.” 

Crowley couldn’t help but smile.

“I personally thought it all went to shit in about the last three years or so.”

Aziraphale released an exhausted sigh which, had he not made himself really quite impossible to notice, would have attracted the attention of at least the entire restaurant and possibly several pedestrians outside. 

“You always say, you know, these humans come up with things you’d never think of in a millennia, but you have to admit, these past few years they’ve taken it a bit far.” 

Crowley shook his head. “I’m still not entirely sure that Satan himself didn’t have something to do with Youtube.”

“The things they write to one another on there.” Aziraphale said, shaking his head in horror. “And the Nazis!!! I thought that we were done with Nazis in the EIGHTIES! And now they’re back, and they dye their hair bright colors and attract large followings on YOUTUBE.” Aziraphale looked haggard, his voice strained. 

Fortunately at that moment Priyani returned with the Papadum. 

“Enjoy!” She said with a kind smile. Aziraphale smiled back, relaxing some of the tension he’d been carrying between his eyes.

“Bless you, dear.” He said. And coming from him, that was nothing to sniff at. 

“I think I see why you picked this restaurant.” Crowley said, watching Priyani as she jogged back to the kitchens. “Is her father the chef?” 

Aziraphale nodded. “And her mother manages the restaurant. Can you feel it as well? The love?”

Crowley smiled and tried to focus. Demons didn’t really go for all that “peaceful aura” woo stuff, although they could pick up on vulnerability and vice pretty reliably. He closed his eyes and tried to hone in on the positive. The chef, tucked away in the kitchens, was so proud of his daughter, who had just returned from her first year at Uni, that he sang while he sliced onions. His joy radiated through the closed doors. The mother’s contentedness at having her family together warmed the dining area. Priyani, blessed and loved, was happy to be home after a few months away. The whole restaurant hummed with a clean, clear beauty. 

A deep itch in Crowley urged him to do something, anything, to mess it all up, but he squashed the impulse. 

“They seem like a lovely family.” Crowley said, once again meeting his friend’s eyes. 

“I come here when I think I’m going to go absolutely mad and do something unforgiveable to Nigel Farage.” Aziraphale admitted. 

“Describe ‘unforgiveable…’” Crowley took a bite of crisp papadum and smiled wickedly. 

“You’ve got to find the good where you can, you see.” Aziraphale spooned himself a bit of chutney. “Not that I’m trying to ignore the evil of course. That would be irresponsible.” 

“You’ve been doing a pretty good job of ignoring me, Angel.” 

Aziraphale spluttered helplessly.

~*~

Crowley had figured out that he kind of wanted to fuck Aziraphale all the way back in 1715. 

At the time he’d been toying with human greed, selfishness, and vanity in London by selling stocks in the South Sea Company, with great success. Any stock-jobber of note could tell you about Mr. Anthony Jacob Crowley’s valuable island property in the South Seas which was sure to start spilling out gold ore any day now, best to buy quickly. Mr. Crowley carefully failed to mention that the property in question was rich in nothing but scenic beauty and pineapple and hell would most definitely freeze over before an investor saw a cent off of it.

The day had been hot, which didn’t prevent the wealthiest of the London set riding around the markets in their carriages, wearing literal pounds of the finest, imperially stolen Indian fabrics. Crowley had been sat outside, dressed in his usual black frock coat looking very posh and cool, unlike some of ladies whose face paint was melting off around him. A rather frumpy man, embarrassingly wearing the kind of long powdered wig which hadn’t been in style for a decade, appeared at his side.

“In the midst of the depravity of these times, where man sells his brother at market and sails across the world to cheat his fellows out of their homelands, I come across an actual agent of hell who is… gently misleading the aristocracy?” Aziraphale asked quietly, with a bit of a teasing tone.

Crowley bristled. 

“This is going to play merry hell with the economy you know…” 

“An economy of blood and theft? More power to you my fr…, good sir.” Aziraphale glanced up, as he always did when he almost called Crowley a friend. Crowley couldn’t imagine why he did. It wasn’t like God was sitting on a cloud watching over them like in some painting. They both knew things didn’t work like that. 

A small scuffle broke out as a group of landed gentry began to fight one another over some soon to be worthless scraps of paper.

“Ah, it is fun, though, isn’t it?” Crowley admired the scene. 

“It’s ludicrous.” Aziraphale said, rushing over to offer his hand to a woman who had been thrown to the ground.

“Get off of me you sodomite!” The woman threw a firm elbow into Aziraphale’s side, trying to dive back into the fray as quickly as possible. Crowley cackled as Aziraphale stumbled back over to him, jaw agape, holding his wounded side. 

“Why do they ALWAYS say something like that!?” Aziraphale sputtered. “What do I do!?” 

Crowley bit his tongue, wanting to say “because you are kind and good and soft and people who are hard and cold and cruel feel an urge to hurt you because it makes them feel as though their own choices are correct.” But he didn’t. Because at that moment all he could think about was how sweet Aziraphale looked when he was flustered and he found himself thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Aziraphale was a sodomite and not an angel after all. 

“I think it’s the wig.” He said out loud, and laughed again at Aziraphale’s utter indignation. 

~*~

300 years later Crowley was still laughing gently at Aziraphale’s irritation, while across the ocean stockbrokers in $2,000 suits elbowed one another over sub-prime mortgages in a very familiar fashion. 

“I haven’t been… ignoring you exactly…” Aziraphale managed to say.

“Ten years!” Crowley repeated.

“Look.” Aziraphale tried to think of all the things he’d prepared to say over the luncheon. He hadn’t expected Crowley to be so BLUNT about it, usually he sort of, erm, slithered around these things. “look, I just need to ask you…” But his throat closed up the way it always did, and he found himself gulping uselessly.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve made up my mind on something.” Crowley said, choosing to ignore Aziraphale, who at that moment looked like some kind of wide-mouthed fish. “I think I’d like to… make an effort.” Crowley said, looking, if not grave, at least very serious. 

Aziraphale stopped attempting to speak, simply raising his eyebrows in response.

Priyani almost made a stop at the table, but the charged moment happening between the two men was so palpable she made a quick swerve and got the heck out of there. 

“An effort?” Aziraphale asked, quietly. “With me? As in…”

“I like you very much.” Crowley said, and to Aziraphale’s utter shock, and secret repressed delight, he noticed that the demon’s cheeks looked a bit pink. For once, he wasn’t the one blushing. Crowley continued, “I like you very much and I’d like to… explore that.” 

This scenario had not made it into any of Aziraphale’s imaginary conversations. He struggled to formulate a response, but so many versions of “YES, EXCELLENT, I FEEL JUST THE SAME” swirled around in his head that he couldn’t articulate any of them. He stared at Crowley with an extremely enthusiastic silence. 

At that moment the door to the restaurant swung open with impolite force. A group of three young men, aged about 18 to 24 and dressed like generic rat bastards all stomped in, giggling nervously.

“Oy!” One of them yelled. 

He was about to shout out an ethnic slur. He was going to do it because he and his two friends had been on some very stupid message boards online and thought that if they went into a Bangladeshi restaurant and shouted some things about immigrants then they might appear to be impressive people amongst their small cohort of pillocks. They had chosen this particular restaurant because they knew only three people worked there and all of them seemed very polite so there was very little chance that even their, particularly weak and vulnerable, asses would get beat. 

None of the three of them could have anticipated what happened next.

“NOPE!” Aziraphale shouted, jumping up from his table and raising his hand towards them, making a gesture of shoving the air. 

Despite the man not touching them, and standing at the opposite side of the restaurant, all three of the young racists were flung violently outside the restaurant, skidding painfully to a halt several meters from the door. 

“Not today, dipshits.” A hissing sort of voice said. As the ringleader of the young men struggled to stand while rubbing his elbow, which was scraped raw, he looked up to see the kind of horror that cannot be put into words. A rippling, bubbling, maggoty dark beast of hell so inconceivably horrible that he immediately regretted all the hours he had spent in the cesspools of the internet, reveling in scum and filth and writing only hate filled vitriol. Because now he saw true vitriol and he realized what it was. 

The young shit-stains fled, too frightened to even nurse their wounds as they sprinted away. Aziraphale snapped his fingers and anyone who had been staring at the scene returned to what they were doing. A few of them later that evening found themselves struggling to remember a story to tell their spouses, something they’d seen on the way home from work maybe? But no one could quite recollect what had happened. 

“Bit violent, that, wasn’t it? For you?” Crowley asked, resuming his human form and tilting his head at Aziraphale. 

Aziraphale took a deep breath and decided it was stupid to waste any more time. He turned, grasped Crowley by the sides of his face and pulled him into a forceful kiss. 

It took both of them by surprise honestly, but it only took a second for Crowley to wrap his arms around Aziraphale’s waist and pull him in closer. Kissing Aziraphale felt soft and safe and lovely, better than he even imagined it would. Aziraphale pulled back first, a wide smile brightening his face. 

“I knew it would be better than holding hands!” He whispered triumphantly.

Crowley laughed and hugged Aziraphale closer. 

“What if I told you there’s something even better than this?” He whispered in his ear. As far as temptation goes, Crowley had many years of perfecting the art. He had the tone perfectly right.

Aziraphale’s blush had deepened beyond pink into a sort of blood orange. He found that he didn’t give a damn.

“Where’s your car?” He asked.

Crowley laughed and gently steered Aziraphale towards the street where he had left the Bentley.

~*~

Inside the restaurant Priyani found a pile of cash paying for food which the two men had never actually received, along with a full 100% tip. Like everyone else in the restaurant, she had no memory of any disturbance. She grinned and decided to surprise her mum with the cash.

~*~

The three young neo-nazis never spoke to one another again. They all logged off their chatrooms, ordered about twenty books on anti-racism and began to work on some serious personal change. 

~*~

Aziraphale and Crowley, in their own way, were also making an effort. Both of them felt that it was past time.


End file.
